Foreign Bodies in OceaniaBronwen Douglas

In the five decades after World War II, a critical historical conjuncture — thedefeat of Nazism, the Cold War, decolonization, the civil rights movements inNorth America and Australasia, and the anti-apartheid movement — authorizedantiracism to the extent that the word 'race' itself, in its naturalized scientificsense of a broad, hereditary human grouping, became all but unsayable in publicand academic discourses in both the West and the Soviet bloc. Biologists andanthropologists denied the physical or cultural reality of races and predictedthe demise of the concept. Postcolonial scholars made hybridity a privilegedmetaphor and censored race from their vocabularies for fear of sustainingabhorrent racial theories or imputing racism to actually or formerly colonizedpeople. Human variation was uncomfortably euphemized as ethnicity, identity,religion, or culture. Yet the notion that racial differences are materially true anddetermine the physical, intellectual, moral, or social qualities of identifiablegroups has hardly been challenged in popular opinion or conservative politicsacross the globe, while many indigenous people have appropriated the wordrace as a weapon in their lexicons of identity and understand the euphemismsin racial terms.1 With the Cold War finished but the ongoing legacies of racistregimes still evidently scarring the lives of victims and their descendants, withracial discrimination and persecution ongoing and racial scapegoating resurgentin the West, race has attracted renewed scholarly attention during the last decadeor more and historians and philosophers are again charting the emergence,spread, illogic, and pernicious consequences of racialist thought.2

Notwithstanding this spirit of invigorated critical inquiry and some admirablescholarship on the history of race, anthropology, and geography,3 generalhistories of race tend to be inadequately grounded in rigorous vernacular readingof the original works of Euro-American thinkers whose broad, labile gamut ofpositions on human differences is often collapsed under the homogenizing rubricof racism. There is a parallel dearth of systematic comparison of diverse nationaldiscourses on race.4 In the twin contexts of these unexpected deficiencies inthe comparative history of ideas and the near-total absence of detailed work onthe history of race in Oceania as a broadly conceived region,5 the essays in thiscollection open up important new terrains for critical historical inquiry — onthe science of race, Oceanic studies, and the intersections of the two.

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StrategiesTwo striking elements of the idea of race are its slipperiness and the ontologicalrealism it acquired during the nineteenth century, maintained in the face offierce scientific and moral opposition during the late twentieth, and retained inconventional understandings virtually worldwide into the twenty-first. Thisvolume challenges the naturalness of race by exposing its historicity and thetensions, incongruities, and fractures within or between shifting rival discourseson human similarity or difference. In the process, we probe the ambiguousconception of the modernist scientific notion of race in western Europe at theend of the eighteenth century; its subsequent normalization as an abstract systemof knowledge, or raciology; its relationship to missionary and colonial praxis;and its instability, imprecision, and tenacity.

As historians of a potent and momentous concept, we treat ideas neither aspurely abstract or discursive nor as a reflex of social relations and politics butas historically entangled with embodied human actions, including that of thinking— the word 'bodies' in the title is not mere rhetoric.6 The persons and actionsthat primarily concern us are conceived in terms of a dynamic feedback looplinking metropoles with antipodes: savants rarely travelled but read, measured,dissected, thought, talked, wrote, and published; travellers, missionaries, andcolonial naturalists or anthropologists observed, collected, recorded, andsometimes theorized in the light of prevailing ideas and their own interactionswith indigenous people; and the products of these engagements fed novelconcepts of human difference that both participated in and percolated into widerpublic spheres. By this logic, the idea of race was enmeshed in the interplay ofunstable discourses and particular European experiences of encounters withnon-European people, places, and things. Current ideas about human diversitywere enacted and often transformed in such encounters which generated muchof the evidence on which theorists relied to illustrate their deductions.

Our aim is not to explain racial thinking in causal terms but to convey anopen-ended sense of the fertile, provisional, material transactions of persons,ideas, discourses, contexts, and their permutations, combinations, andperformances. Spurning such an approach, the cultural geographer Kay Andersonchided me, along with George Stocking, Jr., Nancy Stepan, and other historians,for 'overgeneralisation' and for having hazarded 'no explanation' of the shiftfrom Enlightenment humanism to nineteenth-century innatism. Yet this is adeliberate strategy, not an oversight. As an historian, I reject facile monocausalexplanations such as Anderson's quite inadequate contention, based almostexclusively on a reading of anglophone literature, that 'race's founding' can bereduced to a 'crisis of humanism' precipitated by British colonial encounters withAboriginal 'intractability'.7 While we acknowledge that science is neitherhermetic nor autonomous, we refuse to explain away the science of race as a

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simple effect of particular European discourses or social, political, or colonialcircumstances. Contending that the interrelationships of science and society arenot merely reflective, linearly causal, or even dialectical, we see the science ofrace and colonialism as parallel but porous domains of praxis, each with its own'internal rhythm' and linked by complex, ambiguous intersections andexchanges.8

This grounded method for doing intellectual history requires detailedempirical ballast which in turn dictates a regional, rather than a global focus.Our regional focus on Oceania has both historical and pragmatic warrant: itacknowledges the considerable salience of indigenous Oceanian people in thenatural history of man and the emergent science of race,9 out of all proportionto their limited political, material, or demographic import to Europe; and it fitsthe research interests of the contributors. The term 'science of race' refers tosystematic efforts made in various branches of natural history — particularlycomparative anatomy, physiology, and zoology — to theorize physical differencesbetween human groups as innate, morally and intellectually determinant, andpossibly original. Such endeavours coalesced in the new disciplines of biologyand anthropology which drew major stimulus from the rich stocks of informationand objects repatriated from Oceania by scientific voyagers from the late 1760s.

Chronologically, we probe racial thinking in general and with specific relationto Oceania during a key era — the heyday of the scientific concept of race fromits emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century until the outbreak ofWorld War II. These two centuries encompassed important transitions in bothglobal discourses and regional interactions. Globally, inchoate Enlightenmentideas about varieties within a common humanity metamorphosed into aubiquitous but contested science of race which reified races as tangible markersof inherent somatic differences. Regionally, an uneven but steady contextualshift saw residence or settlement overlap and finally displace voyages as thedominant setting for European engagements with and knowledge of Oceanianpeople. The first of these transitions is the major theme of Part One; while thesecond weaves through Parts Two to Five.

Naming spacesWe apply 'Oceania' historically to the vast insular zone stretching from theHawaiian Islands in the north, to Indonesia in the west, coastal Australia andAotearoa New Zealand in the south, and Easter Island in the east. This extendedsense reinstates the cartographic vision of the French geographers and naturalistswho invented the term and transcends its restriction to the Pacific Islands inmuch later anglophone usage, including recent strategic appropriations byindigenous intellectuals concerned to negotiate postcolonial identities.10 Asoriginally conceived, Oceania embraced the Asian/Indian/Malay Archipelago

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or East Indies (the island of Borneo, modern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Singapore,and the Philippines), New Guinea (modern Papua New Guinea and the Indonesianprovinces of Papua and West Papua), New Holland (mainland Australia), VanDiemen's Land (Tasmania), New Zealand (Aotearoa), and the island groups ofthe Pacific Ocean (soon to be distributed between Melanesia, Micronesia, andPolynesia). The two centuries spanned by this volume comprise only a small,recent, mostly colonial fraction of the more or less immense length of humanoccupation of these places, estimated by archaeologists to range from as muchas 65,000 years in Australia (and presumably earlier in Island Southeast Asia) tofewer than 800 years in Aotearoa.11

In 1804, Edme Mentelle (1730-1815) and Conrad Malte-Brun (1775-1826)coined the name Océanique, 'Oceanica', as a more precise label for 'this fifth partof the world usually grouped under the generic name of Terres australes', or'southern lands'. The French term had pluralized Terra Australis incognita, thefifth continent of cartographic imagination since the early sixteenth century.12

In 1756, the littérateur Charles de Brosses (1709-1777) proposed a geographictripartition of this 'unknown southern world'. Polynésie (from Greek polloi,'many') denoted 'everything in the vast Pacific Ocean' and encompassed whatare now Polynesia, Micronesia, and much of Island Melanesia. Australasie (fromLatin australis, 'southern') was located 'in the Indian Ocean to the south of Asia'and lumped hypothetical vast unknown lands together with actual places seenby voyagers in New Guinea, New Holland, Van Diemen's Land, New Zealand,and Espiritu Santo (in modern Vanuatu). Magellanique — a synonym for TerraAustralis in earlier cartography — was for Brosses a purely speculative landmass stretching to the south of South America.13 Mentelle and Malte-Brunretained only Polynésie from Brosses's nomenclature but, whereas Brosses hadmade it an umbrella label for the 'multiplicity of islands' in the Pacific Oceangenerally, they contracted it to what would become Polynesia and Micronesiaand substituted Océanique for the regional whole. In 1815, Adrien-Hubert Brué(1786-1832) in turn amended Océanique to Océanie, 'Oceania' (Figure 1).14 In1832, the navigator-naturalist Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842)lent his considerable empirical authority to the name and broad geographic spanof Océanie and in the process initiated the distribution of the Pacific Islands andtheir inhabitants between Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia (Figure 2).Dumont d'Urville's terminology was formally adopted by the French Navy andpopularized by his rival classifier Grégoire Louis Domeny de Rienzi (1789-1843),author of the highly derivative but widely-read Océanie ou cinquième partie dumonde, 'Oceania or Fifth Part of the World' (1836-8).15

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Figure 1: Adrien-Hubert Brué, 'Océanie ou cinquième partie du mondecomprenant l'Archipel d'Asie, l'Australasie, la Polynésie, &.a … 1814'.16

Engraving. David Rumsey Map Collection. Fulton, MD: Cartography Associates.

'Oceanica' evidently entered English in the 1820s via a translation ofMalte-Brun's Universal Geography (1825) and was borrowed in the 1840s by twodistinguished anglophone writers. The American philologist and ethnologistHoratio Hale (1817-1896), a member of the United States Exploring Expeditionto the Pacific in 1838-42, made it his general label for all the land 'between thecoasts of Asia and America', including New Holland and the 'East IndianArchipelago' (1846:3). And the British ethnologist James Cowles Prichard(1786-1848) found it the logical name for 'all the insulated lands that have beendiscovered in the Austral Seas', as far as and including Madagascar. A decadeearlier, Prichard had occasionally used the phrases 'Oceanic race', 'nation', or'tribes' but at that time limited 'Oceania' to 'the remote groupes' of Pacific Islands— a usage derived from the idiosyncratic racial taxonomy published by theFrench naval pharmacist and naturalist René-Primevère Lesson (1794-1849)following his voyage round the world on the Coquille in 1822-25. Lesson hadrestricted 'Océanie properly speaking' to what is now called Polynesia and appliedwhat might have been an early Portuguese usage of Polynésie to denominate the'Asian archipelagoes', including New Guinea.17 By contrast, British Evangelicalmissionaries who proselytized in the Pacific Islands from 1797 resisted the newFrench geographical labels until late in the nineteenth century but retainedBrosses's ocean-wide span for Polynesia, only splitting 'Western' from 'Eastern'

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Polynesia in the late 1830s in anticipation of their imminent encounter with a'decidedly distinct', 'negro race' in the islands west of Fiji.18

Figure 2: Ambroise Tardieu, 'Carte pour l'intelligence du mémoire de M. lecapitaine d'Urville sur les îles du grand océan (Océanie)'.19

Engraving. Photograph B. Douglas.

Classifying peopleFrom the outset, Océanie was internally racialized, with skin colour and physicalorganization the key differentiae in the elaboration of region-wide racialtaxonomies. Mentelle and Malte-Brun located the 'very beautiful','copper-coloured', 'Polynesian race' in what are now Polynesia and Micronesiaand assigned it 'common origin' with 'the Malays of Asia'. They sharplydifferentiated 'the Polynesians' from the 'black race, that we can call OceanicNegroes', which inhabited New Guinea, Van Diemen's Land, and what is nowIsland Melanesia, and from a probable 'distinct third race' in New Holland whichthey ranked 'only a single degree above the brute' and likened to 'the apes'.Malte-Brun reasoned that the 'tanned' and the 'black' races must issue from 'twostocks as dissimilar in physiognomy as they are in language, namely, the Malaysor yellow Oceanians, and the Oceanic Negroes'.20

In 1825, the French soldier and biologist Jean-Baptiste-Geneviève-MarcellinBory de Saint-Vincent (1778-1846) took the radical step of dividing the humangenus into fifteen separate espèces, 'species'. He called his seventh espèce

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'Neptunian' and divided it between three races: 'Malay'; 'Oceanic' (the present-dayPolynesians); and Papou, 'Papuan',21 a 'hybrid' product of the alliance ofNeptunians and 'Negroes of Oceanica'. The Papous were 'the most truly savageof all Men' along with Bory's eighth espèce, named 'Australasian' and mostlycomprising mainland Aborigines. Australasians were 'the most brutish of Men','totally foreign to the social state', 'misshapen', and with 'the most deplorablefacial resemblance' to mandrills. Bory's penultimate espèce reconfigured theNegroes of Oceanica as Mélaniens, a term derived from Greek melas, 'black',referring explicitly to skin colour. This species included the inhabitants of VanDiemen's Land ('timid, stupid, idle'), most of what is now Melanesia ('warlikeand anthropophagous to the highest degree'), and remote areas of the largerislands of the Malay Archipelago ('hideous Men').22

Bory drew effusively for this part of his taxonomy on two key voyage texts:Lesson's contributions to the Zoologie of the Coquille expedition; and the Zoologieof the Uranie voyage (1817-20) produced by the naval surgeon-naturalistsJean-René Constant Quoy (1790-1869) and Joseph-Paul Gaimard (1793-1858) —Bory used 'Oceanic' in Lesson's restricted sense and owed his concept ofhybridized Papous to Quoy and Gaimard.23 Lesson (1829), a more ambitiousclassifier than most of his naval colleagues, divided 'the various Oceanians' (hereusing the term in its broad sense) into a tripartite racial hierarchy on the basisof physical organization, customs, presumed origins, and gross corporealaffinities. His '1st race', 'Hindu-Caucasic', derived from the Indian subcontinentand was divided between a 'Malay branch' and an 'Oceanian' one (present-dayPolynesians) which he thought physically 'superior' to other South Sea Islanders.His '2nd race', 'Mongolic', was located in what is now Micronesia. His '3rd race','Black', was split into two branches: the 'Caffro-Madagascan' comprised a Papouvariety inhabiting the New Guinea coast, nearby islands, and present-day IslandMelanesia and a 'Tasmanian' variety in Van Diemen's Land; while the Alfourousoccupied New Holland ('Australians') and the interior of New Guinea and someislands of the Malay Archipelago ('Endamênes').24 Neither Papou nor Alfourouwas a new term. In the early sixteenth century, Papua was a local toponym forislands to the west of New Guinea which Portuguese and Spanish travellersextended to the 'black' inhabitants of those islands and the New Guinea mainland.From the late eighteenth century, it was often generalized to 'black' Oceanianpeople as a whole. So-called Alfourous (Alfours, Alfoërs, Haraforas, etc.) were arecurrent, if elusive presence in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Britishcolonial imaginaries from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.25

Dumont d'Urville's (1832) ethnological classification is more streamlined thanthese convoluted schemas, though no less racialized. He divided the inhabitantsof Oceania into 'two distinct races' on the basis of skin colour, physicalappearance, language, political institutions, religion, and reception of Europeans.

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Dumont d'Urville reworked Bory's term Mélanien into Mélanésien, 'Melanesian',as his general name for the 'black Oceanian race' which he found 'disagreeable'and 'generally very inferior' to the 'copper-coloured race' of 'Polynesians' and'Micronesians' and to the 'Malays'. The 'Australians' and the 'Tasmanians' wereat the base of this racial hierarchy as 'the primitive and natural state of theMelanesian race'.26 The racial implications of Dumont d'Urville's cartographywere taken for granted in 1834 by Charles Monin (18?-1880) whose map of'Océanie' overlaid the 'division adopted by the geographers' into Polynesia,Australasia, and the Indian Archipelago with Dumont d'Urville's 'division byrace of men' (Figures 3, 3a). By 1830, few Euro-Americans would have disputedDumont d'Urville's presumption of the material reality of discrete, physicallydefined, differentially endowed human races, though the origins, import, andfuture implications of racial distinctions were bitterly contested. His racialnomenclature for Oceania was quickly adopted in France but was viewedambivalently by many anglophone writers. The American Hale (1846:3-116)fully embraced it and lauded the 'propriety' of correlating geographical'departments' with 'the character of their inhabitants'. In mid-century, theAnglican Bishop of New Zealand, George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878),appropriated Dumont d'Urville's neologism to name the Melanesian Mission, hisperipatetic evangelistic enterprise in the southwest Pacific. Selwyn sometimesalso used the term as a linguistic and racial label but, unlike the Frenchman, didso non-pejoratively, maintaining 'that civilization is a mere name, and thatreligion is the only real ground of difference between the various races ofmankind'.27 Robert Henry Codrington (1830-1922), a subsequent head of theMelanesian Mission, used Melanesian and Polynesian as anthropological labelsbut limited Melanesian to the island groups east and southeast of New Guinea.He too refused the idea of racial hierarchy. Prichard, in contrast, rejected Dumontd'Urville's wording — Melanesian lacked 'etymological accuracy' and should bereplaced by 'Kelænonesian' — but rehearsed his invidious racial discrimination:'the black races in Oceanica' were 'very different from' and 'very inferior to theMalayo-Polynesians'.28

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Figure 3: Charles V. Monin, Océanie: divisions de l'Océanie.29

Engraving. MAP T 913/2. Canberra: National Library of Australia.

Figure 3a: Charles V. Monin, Océanie: divisions de l'Océanie, detail.30

Engraving. MAP T 913/2. Canberra: National Library of Australia.

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For much of the nineteenth century, English racial terminologies for Oceanianpeople were more varied and ambiguous than French, due in part to differingemphases in the respective fields of inquiry. In Britain, the science of man hadstrongly philanthropic roots and drew much empirical sustenance frommissionary ethnography.31 In France, the science of race was a highly deductiveoutgrowth of biology and physical anthropology, fed by the work of travellingnaturalists.32 Yet, notwithstanding principled humanitarian antipathy to thedehumanizing tendencies of the science of race, English writings on man weresteadily infiltrated by racial logic and language. The authors of works on Oceania,including missionaries, routinely differentiated the 'black' 'Polynesian negro'from the 'brown' or 'copper-coloured' 'proper Polynesian', or the 'Papuan' racefrom the 'Malayo-Polynesian' race, before normalizing varieties of Dumontd'Urville's binary system late in the century.33

OceaniaOcéanie retained both its breadth and its racial connotations in French usagewell into the twentieth century.34 By this stage, 'Oceania' was fairly commonin English and just as racialized despite its narrower geographic span (see note10). In 1920, the Foreign Office handbook on British Possessions in Oceaniadifferentiated Pacific Islanders along explicitly social evolutionist racial lines:Solomon Islanders were 'a Melanesian race, still largely in a state of barbarism'and 'naked savages scarcely beyond the head-hunting stage of development';whereas Tongans were 'a branch of the Polynesian race', 'a highly advancednative race who have accepted Christianity'.35 By the 1970s, with the publicdiscrediting of racial language, the regional name had shed overt intimations ofrace in both French and English. In French, Océanie had contracted in conformitywith the international geopolitical norm that puts the Malay Archipelago in Asiaand divides Asia from Oceania along the arbitrary colonial border which cutsthe island of New Guinea in two.36

Recuperation of the broader early conception of Oceania suits our ethical,political, and intellectual interests. Ethically, we seek to expose the old racialimplications of the term to rigorous historical critique. Politically, an inclusiveconstruction of Oceania unsettles the unquestioned realism of the postcolonialnational and ethnic boundaries that were inherited from colonial divisions andare further reinscribed in the partitioning of academic research. Historically,our terminology acknowledges farflung cultural and linguistic affinities, notablybetween Austronesian-speaking groups, and the trajectories of settlement andother human movements in the region, including those of Europeans, before thecongealing of colonial borders in the late nineteenth century. At least until the1880s, the indigenous inhabitants of New Holland/Australia and Van Diemen'sLand/Tasmania were usually compared, classified, and ranked within the sameregional frame as people labelled Malays, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians,

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Oceanic Negroes, or Papuans. And Oceania loomed large in its own right in thehistory of racial thinking: Oceanian experience and examples were central tothe biologization of the idea of race from the late eighteenth century (see ChaptersTwo and Three); racial comparisons within Oceania and case studies from theregion, especially Aboriginal Australia, figured prominently in thenineteenth-century appropriation of anthropology by the science of race and inqualified humanitarian opposition to the union (see Chapters Two, Four, Five,Six, and Seven); and the region contributed to science's rejection of race fromthe mid-twentieth century, notwithstanding entrenched popular beliefs andvocabularies and the naturalization of Dumont d'Urville's racial categories inmodern indigenous usages.37

Foreign bodiesApart from signalling historical particularity and embodiment, our use of theterm 'foreign bodies' is deliberately ambiguous and ironic. As foreign bodies inOceanian contexts, European and other travellers, missionaries, or colonizerswere received unpredictably, sometimes with joy and hospitality but also withindifference, ambivalence, fear, rejection, or hostility. Indigenous receptionhelped shape the attitudes, reactions, and representations of visitors who in turnimpinged to a greater or lesser extent on local patterns of action, relationship,and understanding. As foreign bodies in European representations, comparisons,classifications, and collections, indigenous Oceanian people were usuallyobjectified and measured as specimens. Ultimately encompassed by colonialempires, indigenous bodies became colonial subjects and were often alienatedfrom their own places — rendered foreign — especially in settler colonies.

It is nonetheless important to resist the distanced binary perspective whichrepresents imperial and colonial encounters as the asymmetric opposition ofdiscrete homogeneous communities, one local and subordinate, the other foreignand dominant.38 Close attention to particular past situations, always messy andmultiplex, reveals overlapping alliances between local people and foreignerswhose respective social and cultural groupings intersected ambiguously andfractured internally along lines of gender, age, vocation, place, interest, andrank, class, or status. Moreover, the foreigners in such encounters were oftennot Europeans but other Oceanian people — travellers, labourers, missionaries,native police, health workers, other colonial appointees, and so forth. Oneproduct of indigenous liaisons with foreigners was the engendering of significantpopulations of mixed ancestry, further complicating the quixotic colonial questfor racial purity (see Chapters One and Eight).

Notwithstanding these caveats, this volume is not per se a history ofencounters in Oceania but a history of the idea of race with specific referenceto that region. Our major concern, with varying relative emphasis, is the

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entanglement of discourse and experience with respect to race. Experience wasgrounded in encounters, where racial ideas and representations were enacted,reworked, or forged, but the level of generality at which the collection isnecessarily pitched means that particular embodied encounters figure onlyfleetingly as examples.39 Our core themes are variety, flux, ambiguity,contestation, and recursion in the concept of race as well as in the exemplaryrepresentations and appropriations of indigenous Oceanian people and theirbodies made by savants and scientists, field naturalists and collectors, colonialofficials and humanitarians, settlers and missionaries. Our wide thematic netthus traces the threads of scientific conceptions of race into political,philanthropic, and public domains. We position race not only in relation tobiological and anthropological discourses but also colonial and governmentpolicies, popular stereotypes, and equivocal humanitarian engagements withthe idea of race and its science. We foreground ideological fractures and national,class, and personal variations which rendered European racial ideas andrepresentations anything but homogeneous or consistent. But we also chart theongoing, if now largely illegitimate appeal of the race concept, its chameleoncapacity to take on the colouring of the time and the place, and its propensityto recur in the face of the most determined efforts to invalidate or extirpate it.

The chaptersParts One and Two of this book set the global, regional, and empirical scenesfor the remainder of the volume and constitute an original contribution to thehistory of ideas. In two substantial chapters of very different focal lengths,Bronwen Douglas investigates comparatively the formulation of the modernistconcept of race in Germany and France; the scientific consolidation of racialtheory in France, Britain, and the United States from the mid-eighteenth centuryto about 1880; transnational flows of ideas about human origins, unity ordiversity, and racial mixing; and the relationships of theory to evidence derivedin a particular field. Chapter One is a history of a European idea. By synthesizinga wide range of contemporary materials, it shows how the biologization of anolder, genealogical conception of race in western Europe at the end of theeighteenth century enabled starker differentiations between essentializedextended human groups and paved the way for a normal science of race spanninga broad range of moral and theoretical positions. This remarkably tenaciousparadigmatic set was not dislodged until the mid-twentieth century and itsfallout endures worldwide.40 Chapter Two particularizes the history of race inthe light of the prolific empirical legacy of scientific voyaging in Oceania, thegrowing force of the taxonomic impulse, and the recurrent tension betweenglobal theoretical systems and regional facts. Through a focus on theinterrelationships of selected savants and travelling naturalists, of deductiveand empirical knowledge, this chapter probes the reciprocal significance of

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metropolitan discourses and Oceanic field experience for competing schools ofthe hardening science of race, as the orthodox doctrine of a single human speciessteadily lost ground to the mounting conceivability of polygeny — the beliefin plural human origins or multiple species.

In Chapter Three, Chris Ballard addresses the middle phase of the irregulartrajectory from voyaging to residence to colonial settlement as the primaryconduit for the collection and deployment of information about indigenousOceanian people. With particular reference to New Guinea, he maps a transitionin heuristic authority between the 1820s and 1870: from distanced early colonialobservers in the Malay or Indian Archipelago, whose imagined cartographiesof human difference rested on haphazard temporal and spatial contrasts betweenthe 'brown' Malay race and the 'Oceanic Negroes' or Papuans, to a newmid-nineteenth-century model of the terrestrial natural scientist engaged inlongterm field observation under broad colonial aegis, embodied in the figureof Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace, championing the scientific method, insistedon direct visual contact and the presence of the observer. Yet his concern forthe correct identification of boundaries for human, as well as zoologicaldistributions both presumed and prefigured key debates on the origins of pureracial types. The chimeric ideal of racial purity became a focal concept throughan increasing emphasis on the 'problem' of racial mixing between Malay andPapuan.

Part Three takes the science of race into colonial settings, with specificattention to the importance of knowledge about Aboriginal Australian bodies,both living and dead, in the developing disciplines of anthropology in Britainand France; and to the negative implications for Aboriginal people of hardeningconceptions of race. In Chapter Four, Paul Turnbull takes issue with theconventional narrative that attributes scientific lust for Aboriginal anatomicalspecimens solely to Darwinians anxious to confirm the evolution of humanityby speciation. He shows that Darwinians and their opponents, metropolitansand colonials, all engaged in bitter competition to acquire Aboriginal bodilyremains for the contrasting knowledge about human racial differences and racialextinction presumed to inhere in them; and that such professional conflictshelped in practice to confirm the centrality of race in colonial attitudes andstrategies towards indigenous Australians. In Chapter Five, Stephanie Andersonmakes a single episode — an actual encounter between three Aborigines andseveral French anthropologists in Paris in 1885 — a synecdoche for the discursivecolonization of Aboriginal Australians and Tasmanians by French raciology.However, she is alert both to ambiguities in the encounter and its representationand to tensions in the wider discourse between physicalist and ethnographicapproaches. The Australians were objectified as characteristic specimens of asupposedly inferior, autochthonous racial type and yet traces of their individualpersonalities, capabilities, and emotional state punctuated the scientists' bleak,

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anthropometrical descriptions. So too, the bewildering physical and culturalvariety apparent in ethnographic reports of actual Aboriginal people defiedsimplistic premises about racial homogeneity or racial purity and introduceddoubt and contradiction to raciological analysis, problematizing its coreassumption of natural racial hierarchy and ultimately the concept of race itself.

Part Four introduces new complexity into this story of uncertainty and riftsin nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race by extending the inquiryinto the early twentieth century and addressing a striking lacuna in manyhistories of racial thinking — the ambivalent relationships between BritishEvangelical humanism and the science of race, ranging across a spectrum fromantagonism, to compromise, to collaboration. In Chapter Six, Helen Gardnertracks a series of nineteenth-century debates in Britain and colonial Australiaover the universal presence or racially selective absence of the human capacityfor religious belief and for becoming Christian. Initially contested as evidencefor human unity or plural origins, by late in the century the purported existenceor lack of the 'faculty of faith' — particularly among Aboriginal Australians —was taken by competing strands of evolutionist anthropology as a sign of thestage of psychic development reached by different races. Such evolutionistarguments provoked both opposition and qualified adherence among Evangelicalmissionaries who had lived and worked with indigenous communities in Oceania.In Chapter Seven, Christine Weir provides another variant on the core themesof normalization, fracture, and recursion with respect to race by mappingentangled rival discourses — religious or secular, scientific or public — onhuman unity and difference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.In key texts by Evangelical missionaries, naturalized racial terminology andsocial evolutionist assumptions jostled with the humanizing imprint of personalacquaintance with individual Pacific Islanders and with Christian distrust of theconcepts of natural racial hierarchy or the absolute separation of races. In theaftermath of World War I, interpersonal experience in the mission field informedan emerging humanist internationalism which confronted the strident biologicaldeterminism of white supremacist, 'world eugenics' rhetoric emanating from theUnited States. In Australia, a parallel contest between paternalist internationalismand hardline colonial self-interest developed in the course of debates aboutAustralia's League of Nations' mandate over former German New Guinea.

Part Five recapitulates the linked themes of racial purity, miscegenation, andhybridity, transposed to pragmatic colonial and national settings in Oceaniawhich exemplify the ambiguous flows between abstract racial theorizing, popularrace pride or anxieties about racial integrity, and colonial praxis. In ChapterEight, Vicki Luker concludes the volume with a comparative investigation intoa colonial puzzle — the markedly discrepant attitudes to the 'half-caste' expressedin diverse settings in the South Pacific during the interwar period. Emphasizingcontexts over theory, she probes the varied pragmatic import of latitude and

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relative chronology, sexualized racial ambivalence about miscegenation andhalf-castes, and institutional or environmental imperatives. She shows clearlythat, if the science of race did not necessarily impinge directly on popularconsciousness or colonial policy,41 its eclectic theories on hybridity andacclimatization were repeatedly invoked in divergent positions taken on racialassimilation or racial purity in the new nations of Australia and New Zealand orin the colonies of Western Samoa and Fiji. Here, too, as in other settings discussedin this collection, the ambiguities of the idea of race itself and the deeply flawedlogic of its science were patent, as were the tensions and fractures in the dissonantdiscourses that race at once infiltrated and informed.

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Notes1 On these themes, see Cowlishaw 2000; Gould 1996; Harrison 1995; Kaiwar and Mazumdar 2003; Kohn1996; Littlefield, Lieberman, and Reynolds 1982; Malik 1996; Montagu 1997.2 A sample of books on aspects of the history of race published or republished during this periodincludes Bernasconi 2001b; Bernasconi and Cook 2003; Brantlinger 2003; Eigen and Larrimore 2006;Ellingson 2001; Gould 1996; Hall 2002; Hannaford 1996; Kidd 2006; Meijer 1999; Montagu 1997; Moussa2003; Peabody and Stovall 2003; Schiebinger 2004; Staum 2003; Stoler 1995, 2002; Wheeler 2000; Wilson2003; Zimmerman 2001; see also Bernasconi's valuable facsimile editions of key eighteenth- andnineteenth-century texts on race (2001a, 2002, 2003, 2005).3 See especially the work of Claude Blanckaert (1988, 2003a, 2003b, 2006) and George W. Stocking, Jr.(1968, 1973, 1987, 1988) and recent studies of the significance of field encounters for the human sciencesby historians of geography (e.g., Bravo 1996; Bravo and Sörlin 2002; Nordman 2006).4 See, e.g., Anderson 2007; Brantlinger 2003; Schiebinger 2004; Todorov 1989. Though these workshave their virtues, the authors have in different ways sacrificed a precise, discriminative, comparativereading of contemporary texts to derivative analysis of an overarching discourse, presumed deductivelyto determine or explain aspects of racial thinking. On the other hand, while Nancy Stepan’s (1982)pioneer general history of the science of race in Britain is sufficiently empirical and often insightful, itis also marred by inaccuracies of reading and interpretation.5 Bernard Smith's groundbreaking studies (1969, 1992) traced the genesis of racial thinking with respectto Australia and the Pacific Islands while Nicholas Thomas (1989; 1996; 1997:133-55; 2002) wrote briefbut perceptive histories of the racial classification of Pacific Islanders. See also several recent historiesof race in Australia (Anderson 2002; Anderson 2007; McGregor 1997); and incidental references to racialideas in works on the science or the art of particular voyages in the region (Copans and Jamin 1978;Duyker 2003, 2006; Fisher and Johnston 1993; Jones 1988; Liebersohn 2006; Richard 1986; Stocking1968:13-41).6 Caneva 1998; cf. Young 1977.7 Anderson 2007:22-4, 67, 109-12, 197-202, original emphasis. Anderson's only access to my thinkingand sole reference to my work are to an unpublished conference paper — an ancestral version of thefirst two chapters of this collection.8 The phrase is Claude Blanckaert's (2003:43); see also Kohn 1996:2-3; Stepan 1982:xiv-xvi.

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9 See also Anderson 2007; Copans and Jamin 1978; Frost 1976:810-22; Marshall and Williams 1982;Smith 1969; Williams 1979. There is growing scholarly interest in the significance of Oceanic fieldexperience in the construction of scientific knowledge generally (e.g., Anderson 2000; Ballantyne 2004;Gascoigne 2007; Home 1988; Liebersohn 2006; Lincoln 1998; Mackay 1999; MacLeod and Rehbock 1988,1994; Raj 2000; Renneville 1996; Schaffer 2007; Staum 2003; Vetter 2006).10 For the limited geographic span of Oceania in English usages, see Great Britain Foreign Office 1920;and Oxford English Dictionary 2008 which defines the word thus: 'Oceania' — '(A collective name for)the islands and island-groups of the Pacific Ocean and its adjacent seas, including Melanesia, Micronesia,and Polynesia, and sometimes also Australasia and the Malay archipelago' (my emphasis). The mostnotable indigenous reclaimant of this restricted sense of Oceania is Epeli Hau'ofa (1993:8) for whom theterm signified 'a sea of islands with their inhabitants' (see also Hau'ofa 1998; Waddell, Naidu, and Hau'ofa1993; Jolly 2001, 2007). Hau'ofa (1998:403-4) explicitly excluded the Philippines and Indonesia fromOceania because they 'are adjacent to the Asian mainland' and because they 'do not have oceanic cultures'.11 Higham, Anderson, and Jacomb 1999:426; Spriggs, O'Connor, and Veth 2006:9-10.12 Eisler 1995:12-54; Mentelle and Malte-Brun 1804:357-63. With 'America' designated the quarta pars,'fourth part', of the globe and its fourth 'continent' (O'Gorman 1961:117-33, 167-8), any imagined southernland must henceforth logically have been the fifth part or fifth continent. The designation 'fifth part ofthe world' appears on the title page of the first Latin translation (1612) of a memorial to the King ofSpain by Pedro Fernández de Quirós (1563?-1615) who in 1595 and 1606 had crossed the Mar del Sur,'South Sea', from Peru on two voyages of exploration, colonization, and evangelism. However, thephrase 'fifth part' is not used in Quirós's original Spanish text of 1610 which refers to the 'hidden'southern part as comprising 'a quarter of all the globe' (Sanz 1973:37-8, 83).13 [Brosses] 1756, I:77-80. See, e.g., the map by Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) in which 'Terra Australis,or Magellanica, not yet revealed' encompasses much of the southern portion of the globe (Ortelius 1592).The classical theory that a large land mass must exist in the southern hemisphere to counterbalancethose in the north was enthusiastically revived by Renaissance cartographers (Wroth 1944:163-74). TheFrench mathematician Oronce Fine (1494-1555) first used the term 'Terra Australis', annotated as 'recentlydiscovered, but not yet fully known', in his world map of 1531. In 1569, the Flemish cartographerGerard Mercator (1512-1594) famously promoted the idea of a vast 'southern continental region' (Eisler1995:37-9) and he added the label 'Terra Australis' to his world map of 1587 with the note: 'Some callthis southern continent the Magellanic region after its discoverer'. Eight decades later, the Dutchcartographer Pieter Goos (c. 1616-1675) treated sceptically the 'cal[l] for a fifth part of the world TerraAustralis or Magellanica' and left blank the far southern portion of his world map (1668:[7], map 1). Yetmost cartographers and geographers, including Brosses and the Scottish hydrographer AlexanderDalrymple (1737-1808), clung to a hopeful belief in the necessary existence of an 'immense' southerncontinent as a 'counterweight' to the great northern land masses until definitively proven wrong byJames Cook ([Brosses] 1856, I:13-16; Dalrymple 1770-1, I:xxii-xxx).14 Brué 1816; Mentelle and Malte-Brun 1804:362-3, 463-4.15 Dumont d'Urville 1832; Serres et al. 1841:652. Dumont d'Urville commanded the expedition of theAstrolabe to the Pacific in 1826-29 and circumnavigated the globe twice — as first lieutenant underLouis-Isidore Duperrey (1786-1865) on the Coquille (1822-25) and in command of the Astrolabe and theZélée (1837-40). Domeny de Rienzi (1836-8, I:1-3) claimed wide experience in western Oceania acquiredduring 'five voyages' as an independent traveller, particularly in the Malay Archipelago, but wasreputedly an 'illusionist, creator of a fantasmagoric autobiography' (Bibliothèque nationale de France2004).16 'Oceania or fifth part of the world including the Asian Archipelago, Australasia, Polynesia, etc…1814' (Brué 1816).17 Lesson and Garnot 1826-30, I:2, note 1; Lesson 1829:156-65, 216-17, note 1; Malte-Brun 1810:495;1813:229; Prichard 1837-46, I:xviii, xix, 251, 255, 298; V:1-3; 1843:326.18 Williams 1837:7-8, 503-4; see also Brown 1887:320; Inglis 1887:4; Murray 1863, 1874; Turner 1861.19 'Map illustrating the memoir of Captain d'Urville on the islands of the Great Ocean' (Dumont d'Urville1832: frontispiece).20 Malte-Brun 1803:548; 1813:228, 244; Mentelle and Malte-Brun 1804:474, 577, 612, 620, originalemphasis.21 Since the French term Papou or Papoua does not always translate exactly into English 'Papuan', Iretain the French forms as used and indicate their particular import.22 Bory de Saint-Vincent 1827, I:82, 94-7, 273-318, 297, 306, 318-28; II:104-13.

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23 Bory de Saint-Vincent 1827, I:84, 99-101, 299, 304-6, 308-18; II, 108; Quoy and Gaimard 1824; Lessonand Garnot 1826-30.24 Lesson 1829:157, 168, 202-5.25 Ballard 2006; Gelpke 1993:326-30; see Chapters Two (Douglas) and Three (Ballard), this volume.26 Dumont d'Urville 1832:6, 11, 14-15.27 Hilliard 1978:12-13, 23; Selwyn to his father, 15 Sep. 1849, in Selwyn 1842-67:216-19, 225-7, 230.28 Codrington 1881:261; 1891; Prichard 1836-47, V:4, 212-13, 282, 283.29 'Oceania: divisions of Oceania' (Monin 1834).30 Monin 1834.31 Gardner 2006:105-27; Herbert 1991:155-203; Sivasundaram 2005; Stocking 1987:8-109; see ChaptersSix (Gardner) and Seven (Weir), this volume.32 Moussa 2003; Staum 2003; see Chapters Two (Douglas) and Five (Anderson), this volume.33 E.g., Brown 1887:312, 320; 1910; Ellis 1831, I:78-9; Erskine 1853:2, 4, 13, 241; Inglis 1887:5; Robertson1902:1; Williams 1837:503-4, 512. See also Gardner 2006:114-20; Kidd 2006:121-67.34 See, e.g., Nouveau petit Larousse illustré 1926:1571-2.35 Great Britain Foreign Office 1920:37, 38, 120.36 Petit Larousse illustré 1977:1569.37 E.g., according to the exegesis of the colour symbolism of the Vanuatu national flag on the officialweb site of the Vanuatu Tourism Office (2006), the colour black symbolizes 'Melanesia and the Melanesianrace'.38 See Stoler and Cooper 1997; Thomas 1994.39 For detailed correlations of episodes in the history of racial thinking with the ethnohistory of particularencounters in Oceania, see Ballard 2001, 2006; Douglas 1999, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, n.d.; Turnbull1998, 2001.40 I use the terms 'paradigm' and 'normal science' in Thomas Kuhn's (1970) sense of a broad conceptualframework shared by a disciplinary community of scientists and reified as dogma.41 See also Anderson 2002:3-4.

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